A WSJ article reports on the high salaries being offered to nannies for children. "A British staffing agency called Imperial Nannies cited a Russian client
who wanted to poach a nanny from another family. Their salary offer: $200,000 a year."

An op-ed piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics asserts that pursuing aggressive but futile life-extending procedures on children in hopes of a miraculous recovery via divine intervention is ethically wrong.

Some ATM skimmers are now so wafer-thin that they can be fitted entirely inside the card-insertion slot. ATM users beware. (for more re skimmes, search TYWKIWDBI).

"Women and children first" on a sinking ship is nonsense in real life. "They studied 18 different maritime disasters, including 16 previously unstudied shipwrecks, between the 1850s and 2011... the average survival rate across the 16 other unstudied
wrecks was less than 30 per cent for women and closer to 40 per cent for
men.
And while children fared better than men onboard the Titanic, this
wasn't the case in the majority of shipwrecks. "Children appear to have
the lowest survival rate," write Elinder and Erixson." Also: "The most stunning finding from the other shipwrecks is of course the low
survival rate of women and children, but also the relatively high
survival rate of crew members and captains." (Of course that doesn't prove that lack of chivalry is the driving factor).

In a Guardian column, Glenn Greenwald notes that the media is becoming unreservedly and inappropriately obsequious with Obama: "But in exchange for such access, Lewis, unbeknownst to readers of his
profile, had agreed to a journalistically corrupt practice - now banned by many large media outlets
- whereby the only quotes he was permitted to use were ones the White House approved in advance. Unsurprisingly, the profile was pure
hagiography that left Obama's most devoted media fans gushing with ecstacy.

Dillian Warden was fined $2,500 for urinating within view of the public even though it was on his own property (in his home's front yard). Dillian Warden is 3 years old.

Israel has allowed medical marijuana use for the past seven years. "Unlike in the United States and much of Europe, the issue inspires almost no controversy among the government and the country's leadership. Even influential senior rabbis do not voice any opposition to its spread, and secular Israelis have a liberal attitude on marijuana."

A message to the Republicans who said they would move to Australia if Obama won.

The first cheerleader in history was a male student at the University of Minnesota - in 1898. And the first chant was ""Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-u-mah, Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Varsity, Minn-e-So-Tah!"

Caterpillarblog presents a photoessay on entomophagy. "I will save the “reasons why you should eat insects” post for another
time – here I will give my reviews of the dishes I made, and how my
students reacted! (they got extra credit points for trying every dish,
which greatly enhanced enthusiasm)

The (totally unrelated) photos are of pet beds, from a much larger group assembled at Marinni's often-fascinating LiveJournal. They seem to be mostly dog beds (I guess cats tend to sleep mostly on human beds). (Sources via the link).

I don't want to watch it because I'm afraid of what I'll see: is the otter video the one where the momma has to leave her kits behind and cries out to them? If so, could some kind of warning be put on the video? If not, perhaps a note differentiating this video from that video?

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

The 2008 Weblog Awards

Category: Best New Blog

Translate

Search TYWKIWDBI

About Me

I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, or distant relatives are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net